The best and most heartbreaking memoirs of race and adoption

When I picked up this book at a local bookstore in Indiana, I knew that it was going to take me places – the cover photo of two adorable children, one white and one black, standing in front of a yellow school bus told me that.

Julia Scheeres’s parents adopted an African American child her age named David, and the two became inseparable. Their extraordinary story – their intense commitment to each other as they move through dystopian settings ranging from the bleakness of rural Indiana to a strict religious reform school in the tropical Caribbean – was inspiring.

And the jaw-dropping ending of the book just broke me into pieces. 

I enjoy reading stories that are complicated, with protagonists who are introspective and human. I like a memoir that raises questions, and a plot sequence that doesn’t always answer them fully. I like reading material that sits, or lingers, with you for days.

All You Can Ever Know is that kind of book. I bought it at an airport right before I got on a plane and didn’t close the cover until the last word had been read. Even then, though, I had to think about it all for a long, long while. Nicole’s story – an astonishingly honest account of her quest, as a transracial Korean adoptee, to discover her birth parents – has since become precious to me.

Beautifully written, the book is also careful, deliberate, and precise about adoption as an institution that makes and remakes families, with powerful consequences. 

I should have read this book years ago. This singularly brilliant memoir is an undoing of the most pernicious adoption myth: that which traces the success of adopted children to their new families.

In this case, a bright and talented young woman makes it out of the foster system before eventually going to Penn and becoming an accomplished journalist and professor, but her adoption out of foster care turns into yet another traumatic experience.

Ambitiously, Patton spins that trauma outward, expanding the background until it spans centuries. When, by the close, she makes the start of a career for herself, that triumph is pretty much hers alone.

Written for the high-end of the YA market, this book goes well beyond memoir as a genre.

Conversations about the interplay of race and adoption are often fraught, and at their worst, some will invoke adoption as big-hearted rescue. “But for the adoption,” they will ask, “what do you think that child’s life would have been like?”

Gibney’s text (recommended to me on social media) answers this terrible question with profound, knee-buckling speculation, turning a simple memoir into the story of multiple possibilities, and highlighting the sharp, searing turning points that make us who we are – and that mark us, inside and out.

Just a fabulously cinematic book, written for the age of the multiverse.

The writing is gorgeous, but it is the story – heartbreaking at first and then, as it closes, heartwarming – that grabs you.

Rebecca Carroll, marked as black, is adopted by white parents and raised in an all-white town. Determined to learn more about herself, she sets out to reconnect with her birth parents, but what she learns is a set of hard, painful truths. As the thread slowly unspools, her white birth mother is also revealed as abusive and controlling.

Still searching for a sense of who she is, Carroll discovers her own blackness through found family, and by doing so challenges her readers to cling tight to anyone who makes us whole.